Tuesday, July 20, 2004

Posted here Tuesday, July 20, 2004 at 10:13:27 PM       From a recent New Yorker article on the Bushes   The Bushes and the Walkers cultivated friendships, deals, and political alliances that allowed them both to exert power and to make profits in the key sectors of the emerging military-industrial complex: finance, armaments, and, later, energy. In the mid-forties, when Prescott helped fund a project for the Office of Strategic Services, the spy organization staffed and run by his Ivy League associates, the worlds of intelligence and national security opened to the Bush family. In 1950, he ran for the Senate, and lost, but he was elected two years later, and electoral politics opened up to the Bushes, too .   One of the aspects Of things like energy and money loyal and transportation is that they lend themselves to large systems and as a consequence large fortunes. Science and technology create these opportunities and they have led to a large distortion in the organization of society.  Part of the political problem for progressives is that they seem to support this kind of direction for society.  Just like the word liberal itself means is socially conscious in the U.S. while in England it means freedom for capital so the confusion around who supports big business keeps the electorate confused.   The religious question helps things be further confused.   Phillips attributes Bush’s success to demographics, in particular the surge of evangelical Christian denominations as a proportion of the faithful. Between 1960 and 2000, the number of Americans who attended weekly services fell from thirty-eight per cent to twenty-five per cent. At the same time, membership in the Southern Baptist Convention grew from ten million to seventeen million, and membership in the Pentecostal churches from less than two million to nearly twelve million. “Liberal religion was being routed,” Phillips concludes. Bush shared the values of this growing bloc and enjoyed its overwhelming support.   Note that the numbers are actually fairly small. Why then does the image of the right have such power? Some of that is real, but some, I suspect is a progressive fear of criticism of the industrial  bureaucratic model which is more comfortable seeing the right as religiously arrogant rather then insightfully critical of industrialization and the arrogance of managerial elites.     then   This kind of recourse to religion leaves citizens no grounds on which to question the President’s actions. If the inspiration of God or the Bible is purely personal or subjective, it’s not open to debate—and decisions based on it become immune from scrutiny. ********

Posted here Tuesday, July 20, 2004 at 10:00:57 PM     Looking at contemporary history, a look back can help. Here we have a vie of a rising middle class that stood for moderation, about 1700. We in the US, in 2004, are moving in the opposite direction. from the magnificent 18 vol history of english lit, on line http://www.bartleby.com/219/0201.html STEELE and Addison are writers of talent who rose almost to genius because they intuitively collaborated with the spirit of their age. They came to London at a time when, quite apart from politics, society was divided into two classes, apparently so irreconcilable that they seemed like two nations. On the one side was the remnant of the old order, which still cherished the renascence ideals of self-assertion and irresponsibility and had regained prominence at the restoration. They followed the old fashion of ostentation and self-abandonment, fighting duels on points of honour, vying with each other in quips and raillery, posing as atheists and jeering at sacred things, love-making with extravagant odes and compliments, applauding immoral plays, while the more violent, the “gulls” and “roarers,” roamed through the town in search of victims to outrage or assault. The women, in these higher circles, read and thought of little but erotic French romances, wore false eyebrows and patches, painted themselves, gesticulated with their fans and eyes, intrigued in politics and passed the time in dalliance. But, on the other hand, the citizens of London, who, since Tudor times, had stood aloof from culture and corruption, were now no longer the unconsidered masses. Each new expansion of trade gave them a fresh hold on society, while the civil war, which had decimated or ruined the nobility, conferred on the middle class a political importance of which their fathers had never dreamt. As a rule, members of the citizen class who have risen in the social scale intermarry with the aristocracy and imitate the manners, and especially the vices, of the class into which they enter. But, in the great political revolution of the seventeenth century, merchants and traders had triumphed through their moral character even more than by their material prosperity. The time had come when England was weary of all the medieval fanaticism, brutality and prejudice which had risen to the surface in the civil war, and it was the citizen class, apart from the zealots on both sides, which had first upheld moderation. ********

Posted here Tuesday, July 20, 2004 at 10:29:02 AM     need to watch out for an Israeli atttack on Iran nuclear facilities. Obviously we are in the midst of a slow escallation. ********